Editor’s Note
Back in the old days — that’s less than a decade and before there were such things as blogs and interactive conversations with readers — editors used to respond to their newspaper readers with an “editor’s note.” Sometimes it clarified a point made in a letter to the editor. Sometimes it offered a correction. Sometimes it was just a simple explanation. An editor’s note was a handful of sentences; maybe a four or five paragraphs. It was always a personal link between the editor and the reader. Only difference between it and today’s blog is the immediacy and the platform. Welcome to Editor’s Note.

Archive for June 2nd, 2009

What if we …..

8 comments June 2nd, 2009

I love to ask, explore and answer this open-ended question: “What if we ….” The staff in the News Tower, however, tends to roll their collective eyes or hide under the desks when I do.

They know, for sure, that whatever follows that “what if we” phrase is bound to up-end what they’re doing. Yeah, it might be something good, cool and important; or, it might all fizzle into nothing. Either way, it’s going to change things.

It was that “what if we” question that started us on our digital delivery journey back in 1996 and 1997 when I asked: What if we created some sort of electronic chat room for news? Shortly thereafter we launched the RRS BBS, a primitive, text-only, phone modem-powered, live chat room that in its heyday had some 10,000 participants — long before most regular folks had ever heard the words “bulletin board service.”

So far this year, there have been two big “what if we” questions. What if we created a local social networking Web site for Rockford Woman Magazine? We did and we’ll launch it in mid-June. It’s pretty slick. Nothing like it locally, for sure.

The second was “what if we were new to the Rock River Valley and wanted to build and launch a Web site — for which people would pay — and cover the news that the Rockford Register Star either didn’t cover, or that we could do better”?

The answer was easy: Create an investigative team of journalists and local experts who have the smarts and skills to report, write, opine, edit, take pictures and video and post galleries, manage social networking and blogging, and, yeah, write for print occasionally. For lack of anything better at the moment, I called it the “guerrilla news team.” We’ll come up with something niftier eventually.

The answer is simple; the doing’s harder. We have created the nucleus of the team, and are starting to think about local experts who aren’t on the newsroom staff and how we can incorporate them. Later this summer, we’ll begin the build out of the Web site. If all goes as planned, well before the end of the year, we’ll be live.

I shared lunch last week with what I call a “friendly acquaintances,” which means the person has political, social or business clout, doesn’t hate me or the paper, and enjoys batting ideas around, but doesn’t come to my house over for pizza and beer on the weekends.

He brainstormed this idea with me: What if you had a section on the new Web site, he said, where people in positions to really know what’s going on could float ideas to get feedback — even if those ideas weren’t ready for public discussion”?

I’m wrapping my head around that one. I think it’s got some legs. What if we ….